16.10.08

Treasure trove: Librivox has released 365 days worth of free, public domain audio books. I've been listening to audio books while cooking and commuting for a while. It's actually an incredible way of learning interesting things while in a relaxed state of concentration that is very conducive to learning and thinking. They have Karl Marx' Capital volume 1 up. Maybe this would be a good time to get into it?

Or how about Kant's Critique of Pure Reason? You know how you could never "find the time" to read it? Go on, get it now. I'm sure Kant's bodice-ripping prose will be just excellent read out loud:

As regards clearness, the reader has a right to demand, in the first place, a discursive (logical) clearness, through con- cepts, and secondly, an intuitive (aesthetic) clearness, through intuitions, that is, through examples and other concrete illustrations. For the first I have sufficiently provided. That was essential to my purpose; but it has also been the incidental cause of my not being in a position to do justice to the second demand, which, if not so pressing, is yet still quite reasonable. I have been almost continuously at a loss, during the progress of my work, how I should proceed in this matter. Examples and illustrations seemed always to be necessary, and so took their place, as required, in my first draft. But I very soon became aware of the magnitude of my task and of the multi- plicity of matters with which I should have to deal; and as I perceived that even if treated in dry, purely scholastic fashion, the outcome would by itself be already quite suffi- ciently large in bulk, I found it inadvisable to enlarge it yet further through examples and illustrations. These are neces- sary only from a popular point of view; and this work can never be made suitable for popular consumption. Such assistance is not required by genuine students of the science, and, though always pleasing, might very well in this case have been self-defeating in its effects. Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short. On the other hand, if we have in view the comprehensibility of a whole of speculative knowledge, which, though wide-ranging, has the coherence that follows from unity of principle, we can say with equal justice that many a book would have been much clearer if it had not made such an effort to be clear. For the aids to clearness, though they may be of assistance in regard to details, often interfere with our grasp of the whole. The reader is not allowed to arrive sufficiently quickly at a conspectus of the whole; the bright colouring of the illustrative material intervenes to cover over and conceal the articulation and organisation of the system, which, if we are to be able to judge of its unity and solidity, are what chiefly concern us.

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I live in Oslo, Norway. Where I work as a journalist in the literary supplement to the daily newspaper Klassekampen.

This is my personal blog, which I've kept on and off in one incarnation or another since 2003. I post both in Norwegian and English. If you want to read the blog exclusively in one of these languages, use the links below: